The Potential of U.S. Forest Soils to Sequester Carbon and Mitigate the Greenhouse Effect (PDF)

quantitative techniques to measure various components of forests and in understanding and modeling the forest carbon cycle. Prior to the Northeastern Research Station, she worked for 2 years as an assistant district ranger in West Virginia and for a year as a scientist with the Pacific Northwest Research Station. In addition to national-level work, she has worked on forest carbon at the regional, state, and local levels, including sustainability carbon indicators for the northeastern United States and the State of Oregon and down deadwood studies in New England.

Richard A. Birdsey, Ph.D., is the program manager for global change research at the USDA Forest Service Northeastern and North Central Forest Experiment Stations, where he has been for more than ten years. Previously he worked for 13 years as a scientist and manager with the Forest Inventory and Analysis Program of the USDA Forest Service. He received a Ph.D. degree in quantitative methods from the State University of New York, College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Dr. Birdsey is a specialist in quantitative methods for large-scale forest inventories and was a pioneer in the development of methods to estimate national carbon budgets for forestlands from forest inventory data. Working with Dr. Linda Heath and others, he has helped compile and publish estimates of historical and prospective U.S. forest carbon sources and sinks, and he has analyzed options for increasing the role of U.S. forests as carbon sinks. This work comprises the official estimates for the forestry sector reported by EPA and other agencies as part of the inventory of U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions. He has worked with colleagues in Russia and China to develop methods to inventory and monitor forest carbon in those countries. Currently serving as program manager, Dr. Birdsey is coordinating a national effort to improve the inventory and monitoring of forest carbon to identify forest-management strategies to increase carbon sequestration, to understand and quantify the prospective impacts of climate change on U.S. forests and forest products, and to develop adaptation strategies.

Rattan Lal, Ph.D., is a professor of soil science in the School of Natural Resources at The Ohio State University. Prior to joining Ohio State in 1987, he served as a soil scientist for 18 years at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, Ibadan, Nigeria. In Africa, Professor Lal conducted long-term experiments on soil erosion processes as influenced by rainfall characteristics, soil properties, methods of deforestation, soil-tillage and crop-residue management, cropping systems including cover crops and agroforestry, and mixed/relay cropping methods. He also assessed the impact of soil erosion on crop yield and related erosion-induced changes in soil properties to crop growth and yield. Since joining The Ohio State University in 1987, he has continued research on erosion-induced changes in soil quality and developed a new project on soils and global warming. He has demonstrated that accelerated soil erosion is a major factor affecting emission of carbon from soil to the atmosphere. Soil-erosion control and adoption of conservation-effective measures can lead to carbon sequestration and mitigation of the greenhouse effect. Professor Lal is a fellow of the Soil Science Society of America, American Society of Agronomy, Third World Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, Soil and Water Conservation Society, and Indian Academy of Agricultural Sciences. He is the recipient of the International Soil Science Award, the Soil Science Applied Research Award of the Soil Science Society of America, the International Agronomy Award of the American Society of Agronomy, and the Hugh Hammond Bennett Award of the Soil and Water Conservation Society. He is the recipient of an honorary degree of Doctor of Science from Punjab Agricultural University, India. He is past president of the World Association of the Soil and Water Conservation and the International Soil Tillage Research Organization. He is a member of the U.S. National Committee on Soil Science of the National Academy of Sciences. He has served on the Panel on Sustainable Agriculture and the Environment in the Humid Tropics of the National Academy of Sciences.